Samuel Hammersmark

Samuel Tellefson Hammersmark (February 13, 1872 – 1957) was an American book publisher, trade union organizer, political activist, and Communist Party functionary.

[1] Just prior to his ordination, Hammersmark had a fundamental change of heart, declared himself an atheist, and began to search for existential meaning in the secular world.

[3] Although the use of judicial injunctions and armed force eventually broke the strike, Hammersmark was inspired by the failed attempt of railroad workers to control their own economic destiny.

[4] A handful of books were produced, including works by philosophical anarchist Leo Tolstoy and Illinois Governor John Altgeld, a man who gained fame but lost election over his pardon of the surviving radicals imprisoned as a result of the Haymarket Affair.

[4] At the convention Hammersmark came into contact with a number of leading American labor radicals, including former American Railroad Union head and Socialist Party of America founder Eugene V. Debs, mining union organizer Mother Mary Jones, Western Federation of Miners secretary "Big Bill" Haywood, and radical journalist and socialist theoretician Daniel DeLeon.

Foster returned to Chicago to take a job as a railway car inspector after having spent the better part of a decade in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest.

[7] He was joined there by Jay Fox, a friend who had edited an anarchist newspaper produced at the utopian Home Colony in the Puget Sound area of Western Washington.

[7] The pair attempted to establish a new anarcho-syndicalist organization in the industrial mecca of Chicago, hoping that their ideas about revolutionary unionism would there ignite.

[8] Foster and Fox's organization, called the Syndicalist League of North America, was headquartered in a rooming house run by anarchist activist Lucy Parsons, widow of one of the best known victims of the Haymarket Affair of the 1880s.

[10] To pay the bills, Hammersmark ran a tobacco shop in Tacoma, an enterprise which also stocked an array of Marxist and other radical political literature.

Hammersmark was employed as the local organizer for the Youngstown, Ohio, district during the bitter campaign to unionize American steel workers.